 | | ▪ | RELEASED BY: | | DARK HORSE | | | ▪ | AUTHOR / ART: | | KENTARO MIURA | | | ▪ | FORMAT: | | JAPANESE / B&W | | | ▪ | PAGES: | | 208 | | | ▪ | RATING: | | 18+ | | | ▪ | RELEASE DATE: | | 10/28/2009 | | | ▪ | REVIEW DATE: | | 11/19/2009 | | | ▪ | REVIEWED BY: | | SCOTT CAMPBELL |
Created by Kentaro Miura, Berserk is a crashing manga leviathan, a perfect storm of impassioned action, impious horror, and improper humour that makes your most twisted nightmares play like treasured childhood memories. Berserk is a mixed bag to say the least, but that should be taken in a good way, not a bad way. Berserk is “out there” and visually astounding in a lot of very normal and also very unique ways – it has a shifting balance that is hard to describe, but it works for this series extremely well. The deep, dark places that this manga travels to both in story and in artistic expression can be as interesting and captivating as they are horrifying. There aren’t too many other stories or manga quite like Berserk – most people that really like it swear by it, and are willing to spend the slightly higher price that this manga is sold at in comparison to most others on the market these days. Berserk is the hammer of the manga forge, a white-hot amalgam of bruising action, breathless horror, and brimstone humour that separates the men from the boys, so to speak. It also separates the heads from plenty of shoulders… but I digress. In volume thirty-one, escape is the day’s calling! Escaping the port city of Vritannis is no easy task, for even the finest ship is useless if it can't be reached, and a horde of Kushan monsters stalks the city's docks. Led by a powerful necromancer who has mastered both the elements and the monsters of the deep, this hideous brigade may be too much for Guts the Black Swordsman and his companions to handle, even if Guts and Schierke are able to join forces and control the awful wrath of the Berserker armour. And will it even matter, if the Kushan emperor makes Guts an offer he can't refuse? The answers to these boiling questions and more are coming up in this latest volume of Berserk! Ha, just when you thought Berserk couldn’t get any stranger, it does. This volume is like an acid trip in hell (not that I’ve had one, but if I were to imagine what that would be like I think it would look like volume thirty-one of Berserk…). This series has always been pretty crazy, but it’s amazing how it can still surprise and be something more than it has been already with each passing volume. Berserk continues to have unique visuals as mentioned, and a story that is about as epic as manga stories can get, so it’s no wonder it has such a following. You just can’t know what “attention to detail” means until you read Berserk – it’s rare when it comes to what it has to offer to all the readers out there, so really it’s no wonder that it stands out as much as it does. This is one of the best manga out there fore the mature reader looking for horror/fantasy – it practically invented the mixing of the genre for its time, and is one of the best examples out there. Most manga don’t even make it to thirty-one volumes, but Berserk has such a rare quality to it that it manages to still be awesome this late in the game. It’s a true epic, and a unique one at that!
IN SUMMARY:
Berserk is one of those manga that is so complexly wonderful (in it’s sick little ways) that it is near impossible to do it justice with any kind of hear-say explanation. This is a manga you’re just going to have to see for yourself – and you should too! You want to miss out on this horrifying epic. |
